Jambusters

by Julie Summers

  Despite the lack of willingness to run collection and distribution, the Marketing Subcommittee was keen to promote market stalls and to encourage more WIs to set them up. Oxfordshire already had two large markets prior to the war in Oxford and Banbury. In 1942 they set up a market at Henley which, after a somewhat slow start, became profitable and recorded good sales figures, though was never in the same league as Oxford. ‘Both Oxford and Banbury Stalls had record turnovers during the summer in spite of so many of the most paying goods being cut off by rationing, and many regulations controlling the sale of practically all produce. Fruit from small gardens, at a time when all the large growers had to send to the factories, was especially welcome in the towns, and fresh vegetables and rabbits also found a ready sale.’23

  The feeling amongst the Marketing Subcommittee was that country people had a duty in wartime to make sure they were self-supporting. Members were discouraged from buying food in a town if it could be produced in their own village or, better still, by themselves. The success of the local market stall in selling surplus food depended on the running of the stall being as simple and free of red-tape as possible. This was a great deal easier in peacetime than in wartime, when the only major concerns were the formation of a small committee and the opening of a bank or post-office account. During the war the government introduced restrictions on a monthly basis so that one of Miss Cox’s main tasks was to keep market stall coordinators up to date with the latest maximum prices for food and the restrictions on what could or could not be sold.

  The market stalls were run by committee and each appointed a volunteer to be the controller. She was a member of the WI but not necessarily the chairman of the organising committee. Her role was to ensure that the produce to be sold was up to standard and she had the authority of her committee to refuse produce that she decided was below par. She also organised the layout of the stall, keep abreast of government regulations relating to rationing and the sale of food and was present on market day come rain or shine. Most markets paid their controller a small honorarium and took care of her out-of-pocket expenses but for many of them it is clear that they undertook the work for love and not money. A description of a market stall run from a street in Norfolk gives a picture:

  The stall had an awning which sheltered the produce and conducted rain-water in a penetrating, well-directed stream straight down the backs of the helpers. They stuffed newspaper between their necks and the collars of their mackintoshes and resolutely refused all suggestions from headquarters that a stall under cover might have advantages. It would be so dull, they said. Out in the street you could talk to all the passers-by and to your neighbouring stall-keepers. Shut away in a shop you might be dry, but how could you see what was going on? And with delighted smiles they offered a wad of dry newspaper to the head-quarters organizer if she cared to stay for a bit and share the fun. Often it was impossible to rent accommodation under cover, and hundreds of people owe a deep debt of gratitude to market controllers and helpers who day in and day out in snow, rain, or east wind, not to mention bombs, shells, and doodles, carried on cheerfully and efficiently.24

  One of the most difficult areas for all WI market stall controllers was the subject of eggs. They were rationed and the sale of eggs highly restricted. But there was also a thriving black market in fresh eggs, especially when the much-loathed dried egg powder became a staple. Adults today still speak with intense dislike at the memory of grey, watery scrambled eggs made with the powdered variety. In 1941 the Ministry of Food agreed to meet Miss Cox to talk through current thinking and the new policy on sales. She met with Mr Flatt of the Eggs Branch of the Ministry who explained that: ‘Under the present order, owners of 50 or less hens may sell direct to consumers, but they are not allowed to supply eggs for sale on WI market stalls.’25 The subcommittee decided ‘to recommend that an interview be sought if possible with Sir Henry French of the Ministry of Food asking that owners of 50 or less hens should be allowed to supply eggs to WI market stalls for sale to registered customers under the ration scheme. The subcommittee felt that such an arrangement would bring into the ration supply eggs which would otherwise be kept for distribution in the village in which they are produced.’26

  Oxford market misunderstood the Ministry of Food’s regulation on the sale of eggs in early 1941. Miss Saunders submitted a report to the county federation saying: ‘It is deplorable to have to report that the Oxford Stall is likely soon to be prosecuted for two offences, (i) selling more than 5 doz eggs to one consumer at retail prices, which was done in ignorance of a new regulation, and (ii) selling ungraded eggs at more than the legal minimum price. The Oxford Controller has seen a solicitor and we are now waiting to see what happens as so far no steps have been taken against us.’27 The following month the committee heard that the case had been heard in court and that Oxford had been fined £5.00 which the market controller, Miss Bartlett, had paid out of her own money in a bid to keep the WI’s name out of the proceedings. The committee immediately reimbursed her as the offence had been committed ‘in genuine ignorance’. The minutes noted that ‘Worcester College was fined considerably more for buying the eggs’.28

  Oxfordshire was not the only county to be fined for failing to operate within the ever-changing rules. In 1943 the Marketing Subcommittee learned that Tunbridge Wells had got into trouble for overcharging for onions. This was regarded as such a serious issue that the secretary of the subcommittee was ‘instructed to make further enquiries concerning the possibility of the NFWI becoming affiliated with the Retail Fruit and Vegetable Association and to make similar enquiries from the Retail Distributors Association’.29

  The WI saw the markets as an excellent educational opportunity. Emphasis was laid on the need for members to learn about the right kind of produce to grow for markets, and on the necessity for proper grading and packing (the market controller was given authority to refuse produce not up to the required standard). It was also a good way for women to get to grips with running a business and earning a small amount of money for themselves from the profits on sales. If WIs had learned one thing about food production in 1940 it was the need to grow fewer perishable vegetables and more root vegetables. Nothing was more dispiriting, one member wrote, than having a surplus of perishables at the same time as everyone else and thus witnessing waste.

  As food rationing and other restrictions were introduced, pressure on women to be the leaders on all aspects of home and family life increased. Good Housekeeping published an editorial in August 1941 that summed up expectations:

  Yours is a full-time job, but not a spectacular one. You wear no uniform, much of your work is taken for granted and goes unheralded and unsung, yet on you depends so much. Not only must you bring up your children to be healthy and strong, look after your husband or other war-workers so they may be fit and alert, but you must contrive to do so with less help, less money, and less ingredients than ever before. In the way you tend your family, especially, your skill – and your good citizenship – are tested. Thoughtlessness, waste, a minor extravagance on your part may mean lives lost at sea, or a cargo of vitally-needed bombers sacrificed for one of food that should have been unnecessary . . . We leave it to you, the Good Housekeepers of Britain, with complete confidence.30

  5

  DIGGING FOR VICTORY

  hese are critical times, but we shall get through them, and the harder we dig for victory the sooner will the roses be with us.

  C. H. Middleton, 1940

  ‘Dig for Victory’ as a slogan for a campaign to produce more food from gardens and allotments was adopted by the government at the beginning of the war but a renewed push came in the summer of 1940. It was a time of great anxiety but there was a determination not to be defeatist. The message came through that ‘the government expects the Women’s Institutes to play an important part in replacing those lost supplies’. They were encouraged to plant root crops for the winter and to harvest whatever they could in their own gardens but also in the o
rchards, hedgerows and woods. ‘With the help of sugar and without it, our members are going to be instrumental in saving for future use hundreds of tons of fruits of the earth from our home gardens and orchard.’1 The war had entered a new phase, as we have seen, and the two threats that concentrated people’s minds at that time were the potential invasion of Britain by the Germans and potential food shortages.

  Mrs Milburn wrote in her diary on 24 August:

  Oh dear, what madness all this is – parents separated from their children, husbands from wives, guns and bombs blowing houses and people to pieces – Insanity Fair in truth, but what could one do? God knows we tried hard not to make war, but it could not have been His will that we should allow ourselves to be trampled on and annihilated finally. There are times when one must fight, and Germany, having set out to dominate the world, had to be paid in her own coin.

  Lord Woolton’s call to arms was directed at the housewives of the country and his familiar, friendly manner through radio broadcasts encouraged them to do their bit. None more so than members of the WI who were reminded of their role in feeding the nation during the First World War. It was the affirmation of the WI’s nurturing role. Talks aimed at inspiring women at institute level to reach for their spades and dig up their borders were successful and popular. Within two weeks of the outbreak of the war Ningwood and Shalfleet’s WI on the Isle of Wight had invited members to a meeting to learn about various soils and their treatments. The afternoon was a practical exercise working in the garden of a large house planting roses and fruit bushes. All members were cordially invited and told to bring gumboots, a spade and a packed lunch. The county federation suggested to institutes that there should be a campaign to use the gardens of holiday homes and derelict cottages for cultivation, provided permission was sought from the owner of the property.

  In addition to talks, demonstrations and letters to county chairmen the WI had Home & Country as a way to reach its members. At the beginning of the war, Miss Moore, the editor of Home & Country, decided to reduce the size of the magazine from thirty-six to twenty-two pages and to suspend the monthly supplements but to continue to publish once a month. The size was further reduced in 1945 to fourteen pages as paper became even more scarce. The magazine was full of advice on coping with wartime conditions: how to preserve fruit without sugar, how to deal with ‘strangers in our village’, knitting for winter warmth, the produce guild and so forth. But there was always space for a diverting story or a humorous column to entertain hard-pressed women and there was, for the first two years of the war, Booy’s calendar, the picture story of a black Scotty dog who got into all sorts of funny situations. Sales of Home & Country fell during the war-reflecting a drop in membership, but rose gradually almost to pre-war levels by 1943. The letters pages are clear evidence that the magazine was popular not only with women, as there are monthly communications from men, not just husbands, commenting on one or another matter brought up in a previous issue.

  Miss Moore encouraged her readership to send in success stories and one was published by a Mrs Wilkinson from the West Country in September of that year. Mrs Wilkinson had attended a meeting of her local Produce Guild and listened with increasing fervour to ‘an earnest and impassioned speaker, who implored us to organize our WI members and cultivate that waste ground in our village, urging us on to this praiseworthy objective like some great reformer of old. Digging was good for us, the most perfect of all physical exercises, he said, holding us with a basilisk-like intensely patriotic eye.’2

  Mrs Wilkinson confessed that at the start of the war she was not a keen gardener and had become an early convert. She wrote: ‘I sat through it all in a rosy haze of patriotism, and then, still fired by patriotic zeal, I attended our next WI monthly meeting. When I told them all I had heard, the members became as enthusiastic as I was.’3 One of them immediately volunteered to go and ask an elderly member of the village whether they might take over her derelict allotment and when the answer came back yes, they all grabbed their spades and set off to dig.

  When they arrived they were almost overwhelmed. The entire allotment, all fifty square yards of it, was completely overgrown and the ground was hard and rough. They decided they needed to employ a man to break it up. ‘Deploring our weakness, we shamefacedly asked many able-bodied men to undertake the task. One agreed to do it, but on seeing the ground said he would not do it for £5.00. Another said he had once had that piece of land, and wouldn’t give us 5s for any crop we could grow on it. We even went outside our own village; but no man would touch it.’4

  The women decided they would have to tackle the job of breaking up the ground and preparing it for sowing themselves. After several serious setbacks, including a conflagration that nearly consumed the neighbouring hedge as well as the scrub on the allotment, they succeeded in clearing their plot of tins, bottles, bricks, stones, foxgloves, dandelions, twitch, blackberry brambles, wild horseradish and an odd assortment of junk. They met whenever the weather was fine and continued to work on their project, sowing and thinning the vegetables. Mrs Wilkinson observed the men on the neighbouring allotments looking down their noses at the WI handiwork. ‘Some remarked that it looked as though a lot of old hens had been scratching about, and others said, “more like swine rooting”. But we were convinced they were merely jealous.’

  In September 1940 Mrs Wilkinson was delighted to report to Home & Country that they had lifted their early crop of potatoes and sold the lot, re-sowing the ground with cabbages, carrots, parsnips and swedes. ‘Our main crop we have not yet lifted, but we have many orders for it – one of 2 cwts. The early potatoes are amazingly good. Our bill for the seed was £1, and our first few rows made £1.5s. We shall certainly have a good profit.’ She was pleased to note that the men who had jeered at the women were ‘struggling to keep their minds on their work and their eyes from straying to our superior and very healthy plants’.5

  Urchfont WI members in Wiltshire were equally triumphant about the half-acre plot of land they managed to acquire for WI use from the local manor house. It had been very hard work digging the ground but, to their delight, the crops they produced were magnificent. The secretary of the WI suspected it might have something to do with the fact that the land had been a pig pen for the past ten years. ‘The best sprouts in the district were the envy of all men growers. Our cabbages were weighty: we very soon sold every ten shillingsworth to the Pewsey Vale Association for resale to HM Forces. The carrots, parsnips, artichokes, leeks and onions are looking fine, and we intend to give the local hospital a good crop of potatoes.’

  These gardens were no exception. Institutes took over deserted gardens all round the country, with the work being shared between members and willing helpers, such as schoolboys and evacuees. Sulgrave in Northamptonshire was running two cooperative patches side by side, one dug by their members and the other by local schoolchildren. Although WI members who sold produce were entitled to keep the profits it is striking how often these were sent off to help the war effort or to charitable organisations to help people who needed support. Baggrow and Blennerhasset in Cumbria donated the profits from their produce shows to mobile canteens while Sharnbrook WI in Bedfordshire gave their surplus funds to the WI Ambulance Fund. Members of Old Warden in Bedfordshire regularly sent vegetables to the communal dinner canteen for evacuees and troops.

  Thornthwaite-cum-Braithwaite in Cumbria announced that many new gardens had been created by the summer of 1940 and that most of their local waste land that could be cultivated was now under WI control and expected to yield a good harvest of vegetables. Allotments run by local institutes became a valuable addition to gardens and were often sown with a single crop, such as carrots or potatoes, so that the yield could be shared out between members and any surplus sold. Mrs Sims dug up part of her garden in order to grow more vegetables. ‘Part of the tennis lawn was sacrificed for potatoes and a plot in the orchard was known as the Victory Bed. My parents grew all our own vegetables and fruit. We had ra
spberries, gooseberries, red- and blackcurrants as well as apples, plums and pears. I also remember my mother planting leeks and my brother John once pulling them all up in a fit of pique,’ Ann Tetlow remembered.

  Fruit and vegetable talks and demonstrations became popular up and down the country with counties concentrating on what grew well in their soils. Shropshire focused on gardening and beekeeping while Staffordshire institutes began a drive to encourage poultry-keeping, whether in gardens, backyards or allotments. A produce guild member of Sevenhampton in Gloucestershire told her institute that she was keeping three old age pensioners, with a combined age of 244 years, supplied with fresh vegetables.

  Mrs Milburn’s garden in Leicestershire was a triumph that summer. On 8 July she wrote in her diary: ‘Some thunder today and a sharp, three minute shower this morning. The garden is greatly freshened. The peas have filled out their pods, the leeks are upstanding and the cabbages are too marvellous for words – they have grown enormously in two days.’ That day Lord Woolton announced, without prior warning, that tea was to be rationed to 2 ounces per head per week and margarine and cooking fats were also to be drawn into the rationing scheme.

  It was not until Tuesday 16 July that she and her husband received a telegram from the War Office to say that Alan was a prisoner of war. ‘There and then, saying “Thank God”, we embraced each other for sheer joy at the good news. Oh how delighted we were to hear at last he is alive.’

  Two months later, on 7 September, Hitler launched the Blitz. The war rained down on Britain’s major cities for nine months. ‘Germans bombing London every night’, wrote Edith Jones in her little brown diary. Even for women living in villages well away from the bombing the sense of menace was ever-present. Patricia Kelly had been evacuated from Manchester to Cressbrook in Derbyshire. She said: ‘My bedroom in the cottage in Cressbrook was high in the roof and I could see the red glow in the sky when Manchester and Sheffield were being bombed during the autumn of 1940. Sheffield to the right and Manchester to the left.’ In October 1940 Home & Country came under attack. The editorial for the month began: ‘this should perhaps more properly be headed, “From the Editor’s Dug-Out”, for it was drafted in the basement to which the staff of Home & Country retires when the air-raid siren goes off. The preparation and production of this number of the magazine has been carried on during a period of all-night and nightly Air Raids, and constant daytime alarms and raids.’ She added that not only had the staff had to cope in these trying circumstances but so had the printers, who had battled on for months ‘with air battles going on overhead more or less continually’.